day one – london to brussels saturday 24 May 2008

After a hearty breakfast in the morning in London, I joined up with my tour group. Well there were about three tours of us at the hotel, around 120 people at least and we were all loaded up onto coaches and driven off to Dover to catch a ferry to Calais.

Initially I was feeling quite lonely but eventually fell in with a group of kiwis, this tour is full of kiwis, aussies, some canadians, some indians and a few other nationalities but strangely enough no Americans.

The ferry trip was surprisingly quick and not at all choppy. At Calais we were met by our tour director Mark, who is Dutch and speaks around six languages and our coach driver Luigi (yes italian).

From Calais we drove for a few hours through France then into Belgium before finally arriving in brussels. I must admit to not knowing much about Brussels aside from it having the headquarters of the EU so it was great to discover a city with a rich history especially for a country that is only 180 years old or so.

In the evening we explored the centre part of the city, which again was alive with a jazz festival, cafe type culture and outdoor dining. We sampled a beer and then had an hour or so of free time to get something to eat. Freeman (a kiwi) and I fell into together an sampled a few pints of the dark beer (quite strong) before finding a place to eat where they kind of forgot our order which meant we missed the bus back to the hotel.

Still we enjoyed the meal and took the time to grab a huge waffle each (mine was banana coated with lots of rich chocolate) and then soak up some more of the local ambience (as well as the rain at that stage) before I showed off my prowess at hailing a cab and getting us back to the hotel.

Apparently the hotel we stayed in is the best of the tour, mostly because at weekends, the business class hotels offer discounts due to not much demand. So hopefully the rest of the trip will have perhaps not as nice, but decent hotels,